The present invention relates to an object region data describing method for describing information on an object region in a video, an object region data generating apparatus for generating information on an object region in a video, and a video processor for utilizing and controlling, and searching and retrieving an object in a video as well as a video processing method.
As a method of describing an object region in a video, there is conventionally known MPEG-4 object coding. According to this MPEG-4 object coding, an object region is expressed as a bit map for each frame, information is compressed within or between the frames and the shape and texture of the object are separately coded.
This object coding is, however, intended to express an object region having an arbitrary shape and texture in a compact fashion. Due to this, the object thus coded is subjected to inter-frame compression, making it difficult to fetch information on the object region for each frame. Further, if only positional information on the region in the video is to be expressed, this method disadvantageously causes over-specification and takes a lot of processing time for a codec.